Henri Zislin was
born in the city of Mulhouse in the province of Alsace (France) in 1875
and died in Paris (France) in 1958. It is significant to his later work
during World War One that Zislin was born and raised in that city when
it was officially known by its Germanized name of
"Mülhausen" and the province of Alsace as
"Elsaß". This was due to the fact that Alsace and
Lorraine had been annexed by Germany as a result of France's loss in the
Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. The victory of Prussia in that war
lead directly to the fall of the French Second Empire and the abdication
of Emperor Napoleon III, the proclamation of the German Empire in 1871 at the
French palace of Versailles, and the loss of these two provinces to
Germany.

Zislin established
himself when still quite young as a journalist and cartoonist, primarily
focusing upon local political events and activities in
"Elsaß" region. By the turn of the century however, Zislin
had become more pointedly political and his work became focused as an
opponent of pan-Germanism and the mobilization of Alsatian resistance
against German imperial rule. His work assumed a decidedly
propagandistic tone in order to agitate for a return of the province to
France and to protest perceived economic exploitation of the region by
solely German interests. Zislin produced pamphlets and published in
newspapers and assumed a reputation as a sharp caricaturist and
cartoonist for regional interests. It should be appreciated that prior
to WWI opposition to imperial rule was not defined solely along French
and German ethnic lines. There was also a high degree of regional
particularism, and Elsaß, in common with many of the imperial states
(including the Kingdom of Bavaria), consistently protested the political
and social dominance of Prussia within the Empire. Since Prussia
owed her emergence as a major power in Europe and then the Empire to her
army, it is not surprising that opposition to Germany in 1914 was often
articulated as opposition to Prussian militarism.
"Militarism" was decried by critics both inside and outside
Germany as:"that particular Prussian disease".
The set of cards shown here certainly reflect that anti-Prussian
militarism theme. On the eve of the Great War and continuing during its
course, Henri Zislin produced some of the most biting caricatures
attacking the Germans. Not many of these are believed to have been made
into postcards, however.

Pictured on this
page are a set of ten color drawings which ridicule both the evil and
shallow nature of the German military and its leadership. The image of
the bloody German god with corpses on a plate like German sausages, is
perhaps one of the most decisively rendered indictments of German
militarist philosophy produced during the war. The shallowness of the
German character is shown again and again as the German military is
portrayed as interested only in feeding their base appetites for food,
drink and women. This banality of the ranks is contrasted with the rank
evil and bloodthirsty nature of the higher leadership up to and
including the Kaiser. As one ascends the ranks from the common soldier,
"the German" is revealed as progressing from banality of
character to outright evil. The set pictured below are entitled "
l'Armée allemande" (the German Army) and were published in
1915 by P.J. Gallais & Cie., Paris. The last postal cards known to
have been produced with Zislin's work were published around 1940, and
reflect a repetition of the same events: German militarism and the
occupation of Alsace-Lorraine. These later cards however, produced when
Zislin was 65 years of age, lack the incisive insight and cruelty of his
work during World War One

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